Scott Alexander continues to delight with his works of short, sharp science fiction (previously): this time, it’s “Sort by Controversial,” a teachnolovecraftian story of training a machine learning system to recognize (and then produce) “controversial” stories by exploiting Reddit’s “sort by controversial” feature to obtain training data.
Alexander’s mcguffin is something called “Shiri’s Scissor,” a machine learning system that produces polarizing statements whose deceptive obvious rightness (or, alternately, wrongness) pits people against one another so violently that once you’ve been scissored, your peace is forever fractured.
It’s a lovely tale in the tradition of Lexicon and Snow Crash, turning on the use of algorithms to locate “spells” whose utterances destroy our ability to think clearly – and as such, it’s a wonderful metaphor for the engagement-maximized political climate we find ourselves imprisoned by.
